The Joy of Typing
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The Joy of Typing
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Re: The Joy of Typing
#2> one 2007 study measured a small group of 21 college students and found their average typing speed was an abysmal 12.2 words per minute
That blows my mind. That's less than a tenth the speed I type at. How do they get anything done??
Re: The Joy of Typing
#3I like that the OP references the NYT piece on how handwriting had cognitive benefits...I guess I didn't read that NYT piece as presenting a dichotomy, only asserting that handwriting had its own cognitive benefits independent of how fast you could produce content. In fact, when I'm stuck in a problem-solving bind, I'll sometimes sketch charts/tables on paper, even though I almost always immediately throw the paper away.
That said, I wholly agree with the OP that speed in production unlocks its own benefits. Working with novice coders, I've become acutely sensitive to how much lack of keyboard-shortcutting can hamper a novice's ability to understand code, especially across a project. The 5 to 10 seconds it takes for them to hunt-and-click for a file among Sublime Text tabs is enough for them to forget what bug they were trying to fix in the first place.
If I had to run a learn-to-code bootcamp...I think the first thing I would do is to remove the lab computers' default mouse input and replace them with the 80s-era steel-ball mice until students realized that using a mouse should be the edge case.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#4> one 2007 study measured a small group of 21 college students and found their average typing speed was an abysmal 12.2 words per minute That blows my mind. That's less than a tenth the speed I type at. How do they get anything done??
I can type that fast on a phone. I'll assume for the sake of discussion that this number is accurate across a general population. If you sit at a keyboard long enough, how can you not get faster than 12.2 wpm? So much for "kids growing up with computers". All that time in front of a keyboard since kindergarten, and you're output is still restricted by your abysmal typing speed?
OTOH, do typing classes even exist anymore, are are we to assume that kids will just learn it by osmosis? When I was in high school I took typing class. On a real typewriter. And it was a manual typewriter...that we could only use in a blinding snow storm while walking uphill. Anyway, I type around 100 wpm now which I attribute to that typing class. Had I just been left to my own devices to hunt-and-peck my way around, I doubt I'd be anywhere near that speed.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#560 words a minute is still very slow, when it comes to thinking speed. Unless I'm just off my rocker, of course.
This is also why folks that take really good notes by hand often have some sort of shorthand system.
My question, then, is it worthwhile to investigate some of the more advanced typing techniques out there? I'm curious, but highly skeptical.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#6> one 2007 study measured a small group of 21 college students and found their average typing speed was an abysmal 12.2 words per minute That blows my mind. That's less than a tenth the speed I type at. How do they get anything done??
I can type that fast on a phone. I'll assume for the sake of discussion that this number is accurate across a general population. If you sit at a keyboard long enough, how can you not get faster than 12.2 wpm? So much for "kids growing up with computers". All that time in front of a keyboard since kindergarten, and you're output is still restricted by your abysmal typing speed? OTOH, do typing classes even exist anym…
We all can probably stand to use more remedial training at typing, even if we think that we're already pretty fast. Every once in a while I'll dust off [GNU Typist][0] and bash it at for ten-minutes. Unfortunately, its been nearly impossible to change kinetic memory for alternative layouts like [Workman][1], there hasn't been enough time to unlearn and learn it without suffering a huge productivity hit.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#7> one 2007 study measured a small group of 21 college students and found their average typing speed was an abysmal 12.2 words per minute That blows my mind. That's less than a tenth the speed I type at. How do they get anything done??
> That blows my mind.
Really? I don't find it that shocking at all that most people might type at a tenth of the speed a programmer can type. I'm sure a chef could express the same awe at my inefficiency when making Kraft Dinner.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#8Did you know that you can type the word
"typewriter" on top row of your QWERTY keyboard?
It was part of sales demonstrations.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#9Perhaps Steve Yegge's post is germane, http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirties...
I'm not sold on typing per se, but mastering an appropriate output method for your domain seems key. For programming, that is typing. For math, it could be either manuscript or TeX. For the humanities it could be either manuscript or typing. Typing always removes a transcription step, but that is unlikely to be the limiting factor for any deep knowledge work.
As a homeschool dad, I think it is important to get kids to a relative level of proficiency as quickly as possible. Difficulty writing or typing or whatever certainly limits output. Different kids will prefer different options and thats fine.
PS. Even if typing is faster, writing allows more free form expression(maps/diagrams/etc) and that may mitigate the speed issue.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#1060 words a minute is still very slow, when it comes to thinking speed. Unless I'm just off my rocker, of course. This is also why folks that take really good notes by hand often have some sort of shorthand system. My question, then, is it worthwhile to investigate some of the more advanced typing techniques out there? I'm curious, but highly skeptical.
> 60 words a minute is still very slow, when it comes to thinking speed.
Well, undoubtedly... Although I don't think you can apply a 'word per minute' count to thought in any accurate manner.
After all, words are just a medium; an abstraction that we're using to convey an underlying meaning, even if we internally represent those ideas with a series of other words/abstractions/ideas I don't think you could necessarily measure 'thought speed' by attempting to enumerate those 'words'.